The Party Politics of the Turtle King

The Chinese Communist Party will celebrate its ninetieth anniversary on July 1st. Amid the hoopla, another occasion on that day is not likely to receive comparable attention: traffic cops in parts of Shenzhen, the southern metropolis, will begin enforcing a ban on electric bikes, including my preferred variety, the Turtle King. Offenders face a fine of two hundred yuan (about thirty-one dollars). The bikes, which are dangerously silent, have thrived in a regulatory netherworld between bicycles and cars, and they are said to have caused more than fifteen per cent of the traffic accidents in Shenzhen last year, in which sixty-four people died and two hundred and thirty-three were injured.

I’m a devoted user—I recently replaced a burgled battery—and, as such, I’ve also become convinced that China’s armada of electric bicycles is crying out for regulation. Enforcing some logical safety protections—for instance, by strengthening existing rules on speed and weight, and, perhaps, introducing a manufacturing standard to give the silent bikes an artificial hum—might curb the mayhem while allowing a low-carbon transportation system to endure safely. Batteries are a long way from perfect, but e-bikes are a far better idea than ushering a hundred and twenty million Chinese commuters into cars.

Shenzhen’s ban—announced, with little or no public input, by the Shenzhen Municipal Commission of Transport—is the kind of antique bureaucratic solution that should make the Party cringe on its birthday. In interviews, some Chinese citizens are celebrating—especially those who have been mowed down stepping off the curb—but a fair number of others are harrumphing about why they never had a say in the matter. “The authority didn’t investigate the real traffic situation nor collect public opinions before making the policy,” a Shenzhen e-bike salesman told the Global Times, a state-run paper, the other day. That approach bruises the compact citizens have with the state. “People buy the bicycles trusting that they will not be taken away,” as Wang Zhenyu, of China University of Public Science and Law, told the Global Times. Chinese reporters don’t causally choose quotes about public opinion and trust in government, and in a worthy piece in yesterday’s China Daily, Wu Limin, a former member of Shenzhen Municipal People’s Congress, went so far as to say that declaring a ban was as shrewd a solution as trying to “cut the feet to fit the shoes.”

Chinese papers have found e-bikers kvetching about spending a month’s salary on a bike that can no longer be used, and on storefront water-delivery shops that now find their business model upside down. (“We have no minimum wage and it all depends on the commission, how many buckets of water you deliver every month. They can’t make a living without electric bicycles.”)

Are the complainers a minority? Or, perhaps, a majority? What are the demographics? As of today, it’s impossible for the public—or the state—to know for sure, and there’s the political rub, of course. With the possible exception of regulating spitting, a ban on e-bikes could not be smaller political potatoes, but as the Party celebrates its ninetieth birthday, it has yet to create a channel for absorbing public input on decisions as apolitical and banal as the management of electric bikes—and it’s not at all clear that it is equipped to do so.

It is a small example of how the system faces uncountable collisions between the rising fortunes of its people and the ability to reflect and accommodate their demands. The Chinese Communist Party has shown great creativity over the previous generation in refashioning the economy to meet people’s aspirations. If it is to celebrate another major milestone, it will need to figure out how to stop cutting the feet to fit the shoes.